Axon Trade Product Update — October 11, 2018: http://bit.ly/2Sqc9ia.
New York Trading Show recap
Axon Trade took part in New York Trading Show 2018 on September 26, as a speaker and a Bronze sponsor. Here is a short recap with some details on this event: http://bit.ly/2AzmYrs.
VOA’s Interview with Axon Trade CTO Serg Gulko
Axon Trade CTO Serg Gulko gave an interview to Voice of America on clearing solutions for digital assets traders. Find the video and English transcript here: http://bit.ly/2CEJWi7.
Miami Blockchain Shift Update
Axon Trade recently attended the Miami Blockchain Shift conference on October 11–12. Here is the conference update: http://bit.ly/2PVCfYL. Axon Trade CEO Alex Kravets spoke on a panel with the COO & General Counsel as well as the SVP of Product Development of tZERO regarding Blockchain’s impact on Wall St, a great discussion facilitated by Stephen Obie of Jones Day. Here is the full panel video: http://bit.ly/2Sg9NCm.
Weekly CTO Q&A sessions
Starting from October 30, every Tuesday at 10 AM EST, Axon Trade CTO Serg Gulko will be running one-hour long Q&A sessions in our Telegram chat. We have prepared a short transcript from the first session. Prepare your questions for next Tuesday and join the discussion.
Market Identifier Code
Serg Gulko submitted the application to ISO 10383 Registration Authority to obtain Market Identifier Code (MIC) for the Axon Trade order routing system. MIC code is akin to a globally recognized ID for market participants e.g. ECNs (like Axon Trade) or exchanges. ISO maintains a global registry of all companies around the world and we would like to be a part of this ecosystem.
Axon Trade recently attended the Miami Blockchain Shift conference on October 11–12. The conference’s focus was on emerging distributed ledger technology and the paradigm shift that will evolve traditional economies, with senior legal, finance, government, emerging markets, institutional traders, and fintech infrastructure leaders in attendance.
Axon Trade was one of the sponsors and were represented by Axon Trade CEO Alex Kravets and Serg Gulko, Axon Trade CTO. Through direct booth contact and networking events, they interacted with many traditional players in the fintech space with an interest in trading digital assets as well as though leaders with unique perspectives on the subject. We are happy to say that high quality connections were made, as a result several potential partnerships are in the works. The conference was a great venue to showcase the Axon Trade brand!
Alex Kravets spoke on a panel with the COO & General Counsel as well as the SVP of Product Development of tZERO regarding Blockchain’s impact on Wall St, a great discussion facilitated by Stephen Obie of Jones Day.
Blockchain’s Impact on Wall Street — The Efficient and Compliant Frontier
Axon Trade is working on product, additional exchange integration, and new initiatives. The landscape is changing with custodial solutions, and the real players are just around the corner.
Boris: It was a very active trading day, Bitcoin price went up to $7200 but retreated back to the $6600 level. There are two news items that impacted the price. First is that the American institution Fidelity with its branch Fidelity Investments started working with cryptocurrencies. And the second positive item is that one of the American exchanges — Coinbase — opened an office in Dublin to compensate for possible problems caused by Brexit. Their main European office will remain in London but in order to support their expansion, they opened a new office in Dublin.
To understand, which of these news items is more important and has a longer-term impact we invited our old friend, Serg Gulko from Axon Trade.
Boris: Let’s try to compare which one of these two news items have a larger long-term impact on digital assets trading?
Sergii: Hello, Boris! First of all, I would like to comment on yesterday’s rally on the market. It happened because people tried to get rid of Tether. Several companies decided to “exit” back to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other asset. But the end goal was to have a zero Tether balance.
Regarding your question — we believe that the most impactful thing is the Fidelity announcement. I’m not very optimistic about the Coinbase move, because the current volume distribution clearly says that the United States is the biggest and most lucrative market.
Boris: Maybe they are trying to expand an existing business? Thing is that the article I found on Reuters says that the European market is growing very fast.
Sergii: Well, in Europe Coinbase will compete with HitBTC, BitStamp, and CEX.IO and I wish them good luck! Ironically, most of the exchanges I mentioned are trying to get into the US market. Why? Because the money is here.
Boris: Ok, let’s go back to Fidelity. How important is what they are doing in the scope of attracting more investors from Wall St into digital asset trading?
Sergii: This is very important! We are speaking about clearing for the last three or four months and now, finally, it’s happening. Players start to see a difference between custody and clearing. Basically, Fidelity is going to provide clearing services. Very likely that right now, at this moment, it’s an advertisement rather than an actual solution.
For example, our company Axon Trade is working with two traditional clearinghouses from the FX world. We are building a pilot project which involves clearinghouse, several exchanges, and Axon Trade as an intermediary. Our partners are no less reputable than Fidelity, but they decided to build the mechanism first and only after — make an announcement.
In general, Fidelity’s move is the next logical step. Once the industry will have rock-solid clearing we will definitely see big institutional players.
One of the biggest advantages of Terrapin’s Trading Shows is that they are a nice combination of traditional financial technologies (servers, NICs, service providers, hedge funds reps) and emerging crypto-markets. This helps companies to understand each other’s technologies, workflows, pain-points, establish good contacts and relationships.
Axon Trade, as a Bronze sponsor, had a booth that gave us the ability to promote our services in a more efficient manner as compared to only walking around.
Most of the people we met were traditional finance hedge or broker-dealer guys looking to add the new digital asset classes into their portfolio. This is why Axon Trade’s way to provide routes (FIX 4.4, cross-connection) to the cryptocurrency exchanges works the best — this is a natural way for these people to trade.
We also spoke to several crypto-only hedge funds that were interested in our real-time market data feeds and forthcoming GUI platform.
In addition to the regular in-booth activities, we had a chance to run a presentation during the all-exhibitions prime-time — around noon. Based on a number of questions afterwards, it went very well. If you ever spoke on stage you, probably, are familiar with this unpleasant moment — “Ok, we have 5 minutes for questions…” and zero interest from the auditorium:)
Two boxes of business cards later, with literally no ability to speak, we realized that even more work is coming. Numerous follow-ups, in-person meetings, calls — this is how we spent past eight days.
To name a few — we hosted BitGo and OTCXN in our office to discuss potential cooperation.
Axon Trade will definitely participate in upcoming Trading Show 2019 in Chicago. This is the right place to be to promote our services to the financial community.
Those who don’t learn history, are doomed to repeat it. Because of our experience in the Equity and FX space, we are facing a real deja-vu in crypto. Retail driving markets followed by institutional players, initially dispersed pools of liquidity lately consolidated into one global eco-system.
Of course, crypto markets are different to the let’s say, FX but core concepts will remain the same.
And, based on our own forecasts and observing huge interest from institutional players, we are exploring several promising venues:
– become a licensed market data vendor. Our tech stack allows us to stream market data in a very efficient way (check this articles for details). Axon Trade is in negotiation with several exchanges (names will be disclosed shortly) to obtain a legal agreement to resell this data. It opens a door to many companies like Bloomberg, Reuters, ICE and so on.
– become an active member of the upcoming clearinghouse/prime brokerage shift. We currently running several pilot projects with cryptocurrency exchanges and traditional clearinghouses to bring this concept to production. Axon Trade role is a pipe between buy-side firms (and market makers) from one side and exchanges and prime brokers — from another side.
Twitter is a great source of information, especially if you deal with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies — it helps to stay up to date and have your finger on the pulse of the market not only by reading the news but also by watching the influencers.
The Axon Trade team has compiled a list of Twitter accounts you probably would be interested in following if you work in blockchain & crypto related fields. Of course, there are hundreds of them, but we decided to select the one hundred most popular people in crypto space, based on relevance and the number of followers.
Note: Axon Trade does not endorse any of these sources or endorse any of their opinions, and we encourage you to consume all publicly disseminated information with a few grains of salt.
American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. Serves on the board of Facebook, eBay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Kno, Stanford Hospital, Bump Technologies, Anki, Oculus VR, Dialpad, and TinyCo. A proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” was developed by this guy. Also designed Bit Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin.
Creator of Statoshi and Infrastructure Engineer at Casa. At the moment, he’s most interested in opportunities within the Bitcoin and crypto asset ecosystem.
Software developer best known for his involvement with Bitcoin. In 2012 founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support and nurture the development of the bitcoin currency, and by 2014 left his software development role to concentrate on his work with the Foundation.
Venture capitalist. Before she started investing, Arianna was a PM at BitGo, where she was the third employee. Prior to BitGo, she worked at Facebook in Global Marketing Solutions and at Y Combinator-backed Shoptiques, where she ran sales.
Bitcoin Core developer, known in the Bitcoin world as Luke-Jr. Founder of Eligius mining pool. He has made over 200 contributions to Bitcoin Core, and maintains the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals section on GitHub.
Software developer and cryptocurrency serial entrepreneur. Created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares, was a co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit, and is CTO of EOS, with the company block.one. Creator of the DPOS consensus algorithm and Graphene technology.
Blockchain technologist, independent consultant, lawyer. Founder and former COO of Monax, a company that created the first open-source permissioned blockchain client in 2014. Advocates for civil liberties, digital rights, due process rights, free markets, and sensible regulation of cryptography.
Cryptocurrency consultant. Jill has done academic research on blockchain and built enterprise products with banks. Right now, she mostly works on cryptocurrency and token projects.
Developer and designer. Built ZeroHouseEdge, JacksChess, LanternHQ and RollWithMe. Currently, Jack is crafting consumer experiences at VC-backed startup Label Insight.
Author, advisor and early blockchain investor. Founding Partner at StillMark Co, Founder and Executive Director of City Fellows Consortium and Women in Venture.
Attorney at Perkins Coie. Advises entrepreneurs, fintech companies, investors, and innovators in the blockchain space. Previously Regulatory Counsel at Coinbase.
Please let us know if you think that there anyone that should be included in this list or excluded from it, and share your ideas about any other similar overviews.
Axon Trade is a company founded by Wall St professionals dedicated to bringing battle-tested financial technologies and standards to cryptocurrency markets. This means higher liquidity, lower fees, and combined platforms.
